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If the presidential election had been held early this month, Barack Obama would have been voted out by a populace both angry and disheartened by his serial inability to spur economic growth and bring down record-high levels of unemployment. Some red states that Obama snatched from the GOP in the 2008 election -- Florida, Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina and Ohio -- would be back in the Republican camp. The nation's youth, which staged a remarkable "children's crusade" for Obama in 2008, showing up at the polls in historic numbers, would have stayed home, unemployed and, consequently, disenchanted.

The victor would be Republican Mitt Romney, who, while by no means a perfect candidate, offers positions that are encouraging enough to convince a public desperate for a strong recovery that he is the right man for the job -- a competent manager with a workmanlike understanding of a free-market economy, not a novice like Obama, who constantly favored costly, super-size government programs in a vain search for a magic elixir.

The election, however, is not until November 2012, and it would be naïve to write off a skilled campaigner like President Obama -- and we haven't. Independent voters will determine the outcome of the election. This electorate's current gloomy mood could swing to cheer if our trial-and-error president's luck changes and the languid economy's pulse strengthens.

"The elections will be 90% about the economy," says Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia, a storied prognosticator whose Crystal Ball Web site is bookmarked by political junkies everywhere. "The economy is all anybody talks about. Obama had his shot. He got his stimulus, and he had his health-care bill. He said these would make things better -- and it's not better. Maybe things will be better in a year, or at least people will have hope that things will get better."

This is the key to Obama's re-election prospects, asserts Sabato. If people feel better about the future in 11 months than they do today, Obama wins. If they feel worse, he loses.

The European economic crisis, too, could be a factor, though it's a stretch, perhaps, to expect voters to connect the rapid ramp-up in entitlement spending under Obama with the policies that laid Greece low. The costly consequences of Obama's expansion of government into the health-care and financial sectors won't begin to hit until 2014, assuming the GOP can't roll them back before then.

That being said, Obama's ratings have actually improved slightly since late October. Pollster Scott Rasmussen of Asbury Park, N.J., says Romney's two-point polling lead over Obama as of the last week of October evaporated by mid-November. Polls now show the two men in a dead heat. This bump for Obama is as much the result of memorable gaffes and pratfalls by the GOP's unimpressive cast of presidential wannabees as it is to any improvement in the electorate's state of mind. In the age of the Internet and social media, a blunder is amplified farther and wider than ever before -- with devastating consequences. Witness the rapid rise and fall in the polls of Herman Cain, the former pizza-chain CEO now dogged by accusations of sexual harassment.

As long as Romney doesn't commit a memorable gaffe, it's a safe bet he will be the Republican standard bearer. Most polls predict this outcome. Sabato says political scientists and campaign analysts assume this will be so. Romney also has built the only credible campaign organization and is the sole candidate attracting support from the party's wealthy establishment, excepting members of the Texas chapter, who remain loyal to Rick Perry.

Nevertheless, Romney must fight like a junkyard dog to win the nomination, despite his impressive résumé. He's a Mormon -- a religion viewed suspiciously by the GOP's large, influential contingent of evangelical Christians. And because of his record as governor of Massachusetts, where he sometimes compromised with the state's Democratic legislature, he's considered an untrustworthy moderate by the party's influential tea-party conservatives.

Democrats predict that the Republican Party's nomination machinery is so badly bent to the right that it can't possibly nominate someone like Romney, who has broad voter appeal. They point out that tea-party-endorsed candidates in the midterms were so far out of the mainstream that they were unable to win contests, including the one for Harry Reid's Senate seat in Nevada, that should have been easy pickings.

Another negative: Polls indicate the party faithful are looking for anybody but Romney. The acerbic Newt Gingrich appears to be the latest flavor of the month. He's topping polls now after bouncing along the bottom like a lead sinker for most of the year. Gingrich should make the most of his popularity while it lasts. Republicans have proved to be more fickle than a child in a toy aisle, falling in love first with Donald Trump, and then, briefly, with Ron Paul and next with Cain and his 9-9-9 elixir.

ROMNEY SUPPORTER Jim Talent, a former Missouri senator, says he views the volatile polling swings as a healthy part of the traditional GOP mating ritual. "I think Romney is the candidate with a solid core of support throughout the party and in every region of the country," says Talent, who has known the former governor for six years."Having said that, I do think that it is typical for the Republican electorate to accept new leaders slowly. That's why typically you have to run several times to get the party nomination."

Talent also asserts that the Republican electorate is naturally skeptical of political leaders and that it takes time for them to warm up to them, unlike Democrats, who latch on quickly to someone new, as they did to both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. "But if you look at the underlying numbers in the polls, the more people see Romney and listen to what he says, the more they like him," says Talent.

Romney's résumé suggests that he's far better equipped to deal with economic problems than Obama, despite the president's three years of on-the-job training. Romney has managed private companies. He's run a large state. He's run the Olympics. Besides being a proven problem solver, he sees the economic forest where Obama finds lots of trees. Romney believes a macro-economic overhaul is the way to fix the sluggish economy and to make the U.S. competitive with China and other emerging economies. He'd cut discretionary spending.

He'd keep tax rates at the current level until Congress could overhaul the system to one that encourages savings and investment as opposed to consumption. He'd ask Congress to repeal Obama-era regulations that stymie job creation, including the entire Affordable Health Care Act and most of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, which he'd replace with streamlined rules that curb reckless behavior without hobbling growth and innovation. And he'd embrace the refrain popularized by John McCain and Sarah Palin in 2008: "Drill, Baby, Drill!"

"ONE THING ROMNEY believes is that the next recovery can be an energy-led recovery," says Talent. "We have all of this capacity we are not [exploiting] solely because of the government. We don't even know how many oil or natural-gas reserves exist because the government won't do a survey."

Romney would lift all drilling and exploration moratoriums, streamline the permitting process and order the Environmental Protection Agency to stop trying to regulate carbon emissions, a practice he says is killing jobs. Production of these new supplies would create millions of jobs and generate billions in royalty revenue for the Treasury, he predicts. The U.S. might even become a net exporter of energy, which would improve its balance of trade with the rest of the world.

That said, Romney's strong support for drilling will hurt him with some of the independent voters he needs to win next fall's election.

Romney economic advisor R. Glenn Hubbard says Obama's policies have been pronouncedly anti-free-market. This view is shared by entrepreneurs in the private sector. Hubbard is the dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Business and a former advisor to President George W. Bush. "Obama's repeated goal is to raise marginal tax rates to enable expansion of the welfare state," he claims. Indeed, Romney and Hubbard believe in tax cuts as the most potent form of fiscal stimulus.

Romney also favors reducing the corporate tax rate to 25% after closing loopholes to make the U.S. a more attractive destination for manufacturing. "We'd have 4% growth if the Congress were to do everything he proposes," claims Hubbard.

That's a big if. Republicans will retain control of the House and pick up a few seats in the Senate, but Congress is likely to remain divided. If by some chance the GOP wins the Senate and Romney emerges victorious, expect a profusion conservative initiatives to aid the economy

Lawrence Summers of Harvard, who was chairman of Obama's National Economic Council until the end of 2010, counters that Obama would be far better than any Republican for the economy. The Obama campaign referred our questions to Summers, though officially he is not part of the re-election team.

"The president has a realistic plan for addressing the country's different deficits," Summers told us. "He has a realistic plan for addressing the current jobs and growth deficit in the short run by supporting middle-income families, by investing in large scale infrastructure and by preventing excessive cutbacks at the state and local level."

The president's proposed American Jobs Act offers a litany of government programs that he claims would create four million jobs. The centerpiece is an infrastructure bank to be funded with about $10 billion and sell bonds to private investors to finance projects. Local taxpayers would pay the interest on those bonds. The bill also contains targeted tax cuts to provide an incentive to employers to hire more workers and programs to modernize school buildings as well as money to allow local communities to retain teachers and police. It's typical Obama: a huge grab bag of goodies targeting beloved constituencies as opposed to an approach that tries to address the systemic problems hindering growth.

Obama favors letting the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy expire in 2012, raising the marginal rates on the wealthiest taxpayers as high as 39.6%. And in 2013, a provision of Obama's health-care law raises Medicare taxes on higher tax brackets and levies a 3.8% Medicare surcharge on passive investment income, including dividends, capital gains, annuities, rents and royalties.

On the corporate front, Obama has said he is willing to engage in discussions about corporate tax reform that eliminates loopholes, lowers rates and raises revenues. But he seemed to rule out immediate action in an October news conference, claiming there were more pressing problems, especially the plight of working-class families. He does, however, propose targeted tax cuts to businesses that hire new workers, with the greatest relief going to small corporations.

But over all, Obama seems intent on raising revenues significantly in an attempt to pay down the deficit without overhauling wasteful programs, imposing the highest tax rates in over 25 years on the rich, the source of most investment capital. This is much like paying to pump air into a tire without plugging a huge nail hole.

Obama continues to push for a cradle-to-grave-style welfare state like the one that just brought down the economy of Greece and threatens to topple Italy, Spain and France, as well. Life under a President Romney certainly would not suddenly become better. The economy is at a dangerous tipping point. If Romney is true to his word, he'd have to tackle major problems and inflict some near-term pain on us all. But the future would certainly be brighter. Romney's right when he says that the fiscal system needs an overhaul to prepare us for life in the 21st century.